How valuable is the UK’s AI industry? Here’s one way to not find out

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UK AI Economy Valued at £1.36 Trillion, Projected to Reach £2.4 Trillion by 2027, Placing it Number 3 in Global AI Race

Gee willikers, that’s a lot of artificial intelligence. The estimated current value is more than four times the market cap of the whole FTSE 250 index, a commonly cited measure of British domestic industry, and isn’t too far off the £1.9tn market cap of the FTSE 100.

The email comes from Global AI Ecosystem, “a first-of-its-kind open-source AI knowledge platform”. It’s made by Deep Knowledge Group and AI Industry Analytics, “an analytical subsidiary of Deep Knowledge Group”, so is the research equivalent of that Marc Jacobs label meme.

The attached report identifies a remarkable 8,900+ UK companies working in the field of AI:

Does the above infographic look familiar? It might.

Deep Knowledge Group is an umbrella organisation that includes Deep Knowledge Ventures, a Hong Kong-based venture capital fund. Its analytics arm has featured in the press occasionally as co-author of reports estimating the size of the UK blockchain industry.

A 2018 blockchain overview, produced in coordination with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain, identifies 225 UK companies working in the field and predicts that Britain will “become a global hub for Blockchain and next generation Digital Crypto Economy by approximately 2022”, a point it illustrates like this:

Deep Knowledge Analytics uses the same formula for reports on FinTech, GovTech and CreaTech, meaning tech for creative industries. Definitional nebulousness helps AI to eclipse them all, with the 2023 report offering a thrillingly comprehensive overview of the landscape.

Here’s just a few of the 8,900 UK AI ecosystem companies profiled on the report website:

• 1st Direct Mail, a postal services company

• A1 Clutches, “the Midlands’ no. 1 clutch repair and gearbox installers”

• Acoustic Energy, a maker of hi-fi loudspeakers

• American Infrastructure Group, an American infrastructure group

• The Blockchain & Climate Institute, a non-profit think tank

• Cambridge Analytica, a political data consultant that closed operations in 2018

• CryptoNewsFR, the French-language sub-site of Marshall Islands-based web magazine Cryptonews

• Clifford James Consultants, “a market leader in motor vehicle diminution”

• Franking Machine Experts, whose website is broken and whose Twitter X profile hasn’t been updated since 2015

• Hermes Technologie, a maker of sewer repair and renovation supplies that’s headquartered in Schwerte, Germany

You get the idea.

The UK count also includes public companies whose involvement with AI may seem tangential, such as Marks & Spencer, HSBC, Rolls-Royce, Tate & Lyle, BAE Systems and Noble Corporation. This stock portfolio is what underpins the £1.36tn valuation estimate given in the headline, while the “£2.4tn by 2027” forecast appears to be based on line-goes-up methodology:

Dmitry Kaminskiy, Deep Knowledge Group’s general partner, is best known for its work on the monetisation of growing old. He’s founder of Longevity Capital and The Aging Analytics Agency, co-founder of Longevity Bank, and is midway through writing an entire SEO-honed bookshelf on longevity. (Sideline ventures, such as his 2017 ICO to build Humaniq, a blockchain microlender, have proved less durable.)

Kaminskiy has an expansive view of how developments in longevity will interact with AI, crypto and [blank]tech. Perhaps worth investigation is the inevitable tradeoff between how much Deep Knowledge Group’s work is extending productive lives versus how much reading its research is shortening ours.